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Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award

The Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award is a senior career award that honors a social or personality psychologist who has applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances to the understanding and improvement of important practical problems across his or her career. This could include making applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances while working in an academic setting, for applying social or personality psychology to other domains such as education, health, law, politics, or consumer behavior, or by working with organizations, government agencies, or industry.

Award Info

Description

About the Award

The Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award is a senior career award that honors a social or personality psychologist who has applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances to the understanding and improvement of important practical problems across his or her career. This could include making applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances while working in an academic setting, for applying social or personality psychology to other domains such as education, health, law, politics, or consumer behavior, or by working with organizations, government agencies, or industry. Recipients of this award receive a $1000 honorarium and accompanying plaque, which are presented at the annual Awards Ceremony held at the SPSP Annual Convention, as well as a complimentary one-year SPSP membership. In addition, travel and registration to the convention are provided, plus a three-night hotel stay.

Eligibility

Requirements

Recipient should have a distinguished record of psychological application to practical problems.

Recipient should not have previously been awarded an SPSP senior career award (these include the Block Award, Campbell Award, Distinguished Scholar Award, Career Contribution Award, Methodological Innovator Award, and Application Award).

How to Apply

Submission Criteria

Letter of nomination detailing the applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances the nominee has made, or his or her applied contributions to organizations outside academia.

Nominee's current vita in electronic format with list of publications.

How to Submit

2017 - Christina Maslach

Few 20th-century, research-based psychological constructs have become so widely recognized that dictionaries date their etymology to around the time when they were coined in a professional publication. “Burnout” is one such construct. Christina Maslach, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, began her groundbreaking work on emotional exhaustion from long, intense, and stressful occupational efforts in the early 1970s. Not only did Dr. Maslach introduce the construct, she has persisted in further research about burnout and in making those who are in a position to use her findings aware of the implications of her work, from which have sprung wellness and stress-reduction programs, mindfulness exercises, and many more efforts to better the lives of employees worldwide. As the nomination letter for Dr. Maslach noted, “the best applied science has the hallmarks of rigorous science: field-shaping, discovery-oriented work that is founded in theory and strong methods. At the same time, it shapes culture and practice outside of the laboratory, inspiring shifts in values, new perspectives upon a compelling social issue, and interventions of different kinds.” Dr. Maslach’s work on burnout has accomplished all of this in exemplary ways. Her outstanding contributions are recognized with the 2017 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award.

2016 - Nilanjana Dasgupta

Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta’s groundbreaking research examines unconscious or implicit bias with specific focus on the plasticity of implicit bias—i.e., the ways in which variations in social contexts cast imprints on the mind to influence the self-concept, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior toward others. Her basic and translational research has significantly advanced our understanding of how implicit bias contributes to important social problems. Equally importantly, her work offers evidence-based interventions that promise to address these problems. The benefits of her research findings have had widespread impact on legal scholars, lawyers and judges, K-12 teachers and students, educators in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), businesses and entrepreneurs, and policy-makers at the state and federal level. As a testament to the basic and translational value of her work, Dr. Dasgupta recently gave an invited Distinguished Lecture at the National Science Foundation. In 2014, she received the Distinguished Academic Outreach Award in Research from UMass-Amherst. In 2012, she received the Hidden Bias Research Prize awarded by Level Playing Field Institute, a private foundation based in Silicon Valley, for an “outstanding research article on gender equity in the classroom.” In 2005 she received the Morton Deutsch Award from the International Society for Justice Research. Her research findings have been featured in leading journalistic outlets including The New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, London Times, National Public Radio, PBS News Hour, BBC Radio, ABC News, Scientific American Mind, Slate.com, etc. Dr. Dasgupta’s research epitomizes the ideal of theoretically incisive basic research that she applies to a wide array of important social problems and contexts and disseminates to practitioners and policy makers nationwide.

Contact

2017 Chair

2018 Chair

SPSP Awards Coordinator

Join SPSP or Renew Membership

Membership in SPSP is open to students and those whose work focuses largely in social/personality psychology. Members receive discounts to the SPSP Convention, access to three journals, access to the SPSP Job Board, and much more.